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Trickhouse Parlour, January 2011


Joan Fiset & Sabrina Roberts

Ignis Fatuus

A phosphorescent light that hovers or flits over swampy ground at night --

 

1  

We almost admit the solitary chirp.

Brief sun. Even so eyes advance reporting bad fortune in a paisley headdress. Its smoke resembles an eyebrow. Recognize the house; white stucco, red flowers growing.  Pick one tomorrow. She desired a blue background. To awake unencumbered. Then to walk there.

 

 

 

2

Holes for the breath.
Refusal to say this is what we see.

Nearly noon. She pretending to breathe. This
the event; linen suit, strand of pearls, her navy
clutch purse on Sunday where the road will wind
past  bungalow and neighbor’s car. Half light. Iris.
Exhale toward the dim.

 

 

3

Even feet go up sometimes in the vertical
invitation. One by one by every day.
All in all.

On hands and knees she settles in. Everywhere needles and pins.  Memory of fingers, a tight tap-tapping on her chest.  Bird feet stick-like, falter in a brittle noon.

 

 

 

 

4.

Every which way upside down scatters on the snow.
Dish towel damp. A foreign room. Chiseled kite
without a string. Heading towards the object – fins..

Blue jaws open into the room. A clothesline.  White sheets pinned within the maw. Mind stock still in ice. Lean in to touch blue ceiling. Against the wall shadows form the bridge. Blue floor where no one hears us. Close up a house grown busy. Where it seems to move we forget the status of landlocked terrain. As the into air.

 

 

 

bios:

Joan Fiset's book of memoir prose poems, Now the Day Is Over (Blue Begonia 1997) won the King Country Publication Award. Publications include Tarpaulin Sky, Wave Books Bedazzler, the Seattle Review, Cranky and others. Excerpts from "How It Was With Scotland," a text/image collaboration with Noah Saterstrom, appear in GenPopBooks on line magazine No Contest.

Sabrina Roberts recently returned to Seattle from Namibia, Africa where she taught English and Art while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Sabrina studied photography at the University of Washington while completing a Bachelor of Arts in English and continued her studies in photography at the Maine Media Workshops, where she completed a one-year resident program. Her photos have been published in Shots Magazine, Washington English Journal and Press. Group exhibitions include: Photographic Center Northwest, 10thAnnual Photographic Competition Exhibition, Opus, Maine, University of Maine at Augusta and the Maine Photographic Workshops, Rockport, Maine. www.sabrinaroberts.com


 

all contents © copyright 2011 / design by Noah Saterstrom